Alberto Guerrero


Antonio Alberto García Guerrero was a Chilean composer, pianist, and teacher. While he is most famously remembered as the mentor of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, Guerrero influenced several generations of musicians through his many years of teaching at the Toronto Conservatory of Music.

Biography

Born in La Serena, Chile, Guerrero first studied piano with his mother and older brother Daniel; he was otherwise self-taught. After the family moved to Santiago in the early 1890s, he became part of a group of artists and intellectuals who called themselves Los Diez. A resourceful composer and talented concert pianist, Guerrero had a reform-minded influence on Chilean musical life. His brother Eduardo became a music critic, and Alberto contributed articles and reviews to the newspaper El diario ilustrado. He published a treatise in 1915 entitled La armonia moderna.
Guerrero introduced Chilean audiences to the modern music of his day, including works by Debussy, Ravel, Cyril Scott, Scriabin, and Schoenberg. He founded and conducted Santiago's first symphony orchestra and was active in founding the Sociedad Bach in 1917.
In 1918, during a honeymoon trip to New York City, Guerrero came in contact with members of the Hambourg family, who invited him to teach at the recently established Hambourg Conservatory in Toronto. Guerrero accepted this position and emigrated to Canada with his wife and daughter the following year.
In Toronto, Guerrero performed for a few years with the Hambourg Trio. While he shifted his focus to piano technique and pedagogy, he expanded his performing repertory to include works from Purcell through Les Six. As one of Canada's most active pianists, he played regular radio recitals beginning in the mid-1920s and through to the early 1950s. He also initiated a subscription series of solo recitals from 1932 to 1937. Each season had four or five recitals, and often covered neglected works by Bach, Alessandro Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, 18th-century Spanish composers, 20th-century French composers, and Stravinsky. Bach pieces included the complete inventions and sinfonias, as well as the Goldberg Variations, all of which were later popularized by his pupil Glenn Gould. Guerrero performed in various chamber ensembles with musicians including Frank Blachford, Leo Smith, Harold Sumberg, and Cornelius Ysselstyn. For over a decade, he was also a member of the Five Piano Ensemble.
In 1922, Guerrero left the Hambourg Conservatory and joined the Toronto Conservatory of Music, where he remained until his death in Toronto in 1959, having established himself as one of Canada's preeminent music teachers.
Guerrero was known to be quiet and focused. His near self-effacement gave rise to some of the most prominent Canadian musicians of the late 20th century. He had a decisive technical and aesthetic influence on Glenn Gould, whom he mentored for 10 years, even though Gould later claimed to be self-taught. Guerrero was also known for his keen intellect and eloquence vis-à-vis painting, poetry, and philosophy. "He was one of the few musicians from whom a student would get a vista of ideas beyond music", recalls composer R. Murray Schafer, who composed In Memoriam Alberto Guerrero a few months after his teacher's death.

Compositions

Guerrero had been known as a versatile composer in Santiago. In addition to a number of chamber works and piano solos, he wrote music for 4 or 5 operettas and zarzuelas which were produced in Chile between 1908 and 1915. However, after moving to Canada, Guerrero focused more on teaching, though a couple of piano works were published in 1937. He also collaborated with his second wife Myrtle Rose Guerrero to co-author The New Approach to the Piano.

Students

As a prominent member of the music circles in Santiago and later at the Toronto Conservatory of Music, Guerrero influenced generations of students who would go on to shape the musical life of Chile, Canada, and beyond. What follows is an incomplete list: